


the clocks are black

by freyafrida



Category: Midnighters - Scott Westerfeld
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-08-14 01:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16483733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freyafrida/pseuds/freyafrida
Summary: The midnighters try to save Jessica and learn to live in the world after Samhain.





	1. warn your warmth to turn away

**Author's Note:**

> so all of the concrete dates that we get in midnighters books point towards the series taking place in 2005, which means that it's officially been 13 years since jessica day was sucked into the blue time! which is a good a time as any for me to post this fic, because i reread these books a while ago and guess what? i still have LOTS OF FEELINGS about them because i'm permanently 12 years old, and i wanted to write some fix-it wherein the characters actually feel some kind of way about their friend throwing herself into a lightning bolt.
> 
> notes and stuff: this is slightly AU, because i thought it made more sense for jess to stay in bixby. also i actually got carried away doing ~research~ on the various locations of this series, and as we know, the bixby of the books is nothing like the bixby of reality. i tried to balance the books' world with actual real geography as well as i could. also i'm terrible at math irl so like, if i fuck up any of dess's calculations, please just roll with it, idk what i'm doing dudes.
> 
> fic title is from "16 shades of blue" by tori amos. in honor of the series' setting and also of my teenage self, i'm naming as many chapters as possible after mid-2000s ~alternative~ songs, and this chapter title is from "love like winter" by AFI.

Dess sighs, rubbing her eyes, trying to push sleep away. It's after midnight — way past her usual bedtime — but she's still awake.

This isn't so unusual, these days. She's always been a night owl, but usually she manages to hit the sack before sunrise. Lately, though, even when she can see the sky turning pink in the distance, Dess just chugs more coffee and keeps going.

Good for research. Not so good for her ability to pay attention in school.

Dess has been skipping class more than ever, but she knows she has to at least occasionally attend, to keep her parents off her back. That's more important than ever, now that the cops are poking around, asking about Jessica Day. Plus, polymath or not, a bunch of absences will not look good to colleges, which would really put a damper on the whole "getting the hell out of here" thing.

And if she's right, and the blue time's spread beyond Bixby — that's more important than ever now, too.

Dess downs the last of her coffee, then goes to get dressed. Rex had told them about how the darklings kept saying that winter was coming. Well, it's definitely nearly here. Dad doesn't like putting the heat on unless it's absolutely necessary — Dess guesses when their lips actually start turning blue — so the cold penetrates the walls of the house, the wind making it creak more than usual. It's a good thing black absorbs heat.

Dess has it nearly down to a routine, now — she pulls on wool tights, a long skirt, and a top. Then she sets her alarm to go off in an hour, and throws herself onto her bed to get some sleep. An hour of sleep a day is nobody's friend, she knows, but what's the worst that could happen? She won't be able to pay attention in trig?

Besides, the more she sleeps, the more she dreams. Of Samhain, of Jessica.

Sleep deprivation really isn't that bad, in comparison.

Her alarm is set to blare at maximum volume, which it does all too soon. Dess fumbles around to slap the off button, then rises with a heavy groan. She can't afford to miss the bus.

She rakes her fingers through her hair to brush it and throws on her jacket. Boots, bag — she nearly forgets to lock the door when she leaves, and has to double back. The likelihood of anything being stolen from her house, here on the ass-end of town, is low — but she can't exactly jack another soldering gun from shop, so she doesn't want to risk it.

The bus rolls through town, stopping every few blocks with a pneumatic hiss. Dess watches the houses go by, with their same driveways, same lawns. It's weird how everything looks different, in the world after the long midnight. It shouldn't. Everything should look the same, should be the same. They closed the rip, all the darkling bodies were burned away by the sunrise, and the entirety of Tulsa County quietly agreed to forget about that night.

Dess will never forget — watching Jess and Jonathan fly to the top of Pegasus, their silhouettes lit up by the fork of lightning striking the horse. She remembers seeing Jess turn to the lightning, and then a flash so blinding that covering her eyes wasn't enough, and she'd curled up into herself, nearly fetal.

When she had looked up again, Jess was gone.

She'd run down the stairs of the office building where they'd set up the bomb, then up to the Mobil Building, her sides screaming in pain. For the first time in her life, Dess regretted not participating more in gym class. She'd practically had to haul Jonathan away from the roof while he babbled about Jess and the lightning, the words coming out so fast and broken that Dess hadn't been able to make any sense of it.

It wasn't until they had driven out to Jenks and picked up Rex and Melissa that Jonathan had managed to get it all out — how Jess had disappeared off the roof, into the lightning. There was no body — no proof that she had ever been there. Melissa had tipped her head back and then, after a long minute, whispered that she couldn't feel Jessica at all.

Dess didn't cry there, in the car. None of them did. Instead they had all sat there, blank with shock.

"What did we just do?" Flyboy had whispered. Then, stronger: "Rex, what did you _do?_ "

"We saved Bixby," Rex said, but his voice broke. "She had to do it. She _had_ to."

Dess had tried to do the math, leaning against the car window, feeling grief expand in her chest. They must have saved hundreds — maybe even thousands — of people. Jessica is one person. You don't have to be a polymath to know that 1000 is greater than 1, that even just Cassie Flinders and Beth Day are greater...

"Stop it, Dess!" Melissa cried. "Don't _think_ like that! You know that's not — it's not —"

Then her voice choked, and she covered her mouth with a shaking hand.

The sight of Melissa grieving had cracked something open in all of them. Whatever fight Jonathan had wanted to pick with Rex was silenced. He drove them home, one by one, the silence only broken by Melissa murmuring when they were about to run into the cops.

And then they had found Jess again, the next midnight. Trapped there.

She's not gone, and you'd think that would make things easier. Dess thought it would, that first night they saw her. Thought that once midnight ended, she would walk away without the heaviness in her chest.

But she was wrong. She walked into Bixby High School on Monday, and went to study hall before lunch, and Jessica wasn't there. She's not there to steal Dess's math notes, or to do that weird scrunchy thing with her nose when she can't figure out the homework. In trig, Dess has to keep her smartass comments to herself, because she has no one to whisper them to. She only sees Jessica for one hour a day — not even that, sometimes, when Dess can't make it out to Madeleine's house. Jessica more or less "lives" there now.

This is why getting close to people sucks, Dess thinks.

It sucks even more, because if she's being honest — if she's being really honest —

Yeah, fine, she misses Flyboy and Melissa, too. They have the decency to call her or Rex whenever they run into a pay phone — although they always call collect, _thanks guys_ — but she's gotten so used to having them around, that the past couple of weeks without them is just...weird.

Rex isn't as bad as he was, though. At least, he hasn't shown any signs of wanting to eat anyone lately. Samhain was pretty much peak darkling for him, or so he says. Dess has to admit that he seems almost normal these days — the routine of school, watching over his dad and crazy Maddy, and doing homework with Dess seems to have a kind of soothing effect on him.

That's what Melissa had said, anyway, before she'd left. And then she'd said to Dess, "Look, I know I shouldn't be asking this —"

 _But you're going to anyway_ , Dess had thought, trying not to roll her eyes.

Melissa either didn't hear that, or just chose to ignore it. "But Rex needs someone. Caring about people is what's keeping him sane, you know? It's all that kept him from eating us, when he was first transformed."

"Oh, great," Dess said. "And you guys are ditching me with him?"

Melissa gave her a dirty look. "Don't leave him alone, Dess. Please?"

Dess can count the number of times Melissa's said _please_ — non-sarcastically — on one hand. And she doesn't have to use all her fingers.

"Fine," she had said, with a sigh.

Again with the being totally honest thing — which she can afford to do now, at least, with Melissa out of town — she hadn't been planning on ditching Rex, anyway. With the rest of the living — such as it is — midnighters gone, he's basically her only friend.

Well, that's just depressing.

They're closer into town, passing 7-Elevens and QuikTrips. At one of the stops, Rex gets on.

Despite everything, Dess smirks. The world might have nearly ended, but it would take more than the apocalypse for Rex to drive his mom's pink Cadillac to school. And without Melissa to drive him around, he's been demoted to riding the bus with the rest of the plebes, a.k.a underclassmen. Dess lets herself take just a _little_ bit of pleasure in his suffering.

"Hey, Rex," she says, moving her bag so he can drop down next to her.

"Hey, Dess," he says, sounding tired. He has to fold up his long frame to fit into the bus seat, knees almost up to his chin. "How's it going?"

Dess shrugs. "Well, I'm officially cleared of suspicion in Jessica's disappearance. I mean, for now. St. Claire said he'd be back if they found anything new. He was trying pretty hard to sound like the Terminator."

Rex shakes his head. "I'd say he's almost happy about Jessica disappearing. This must be the most action the cops have seen in years."

"They're going to be so sad when they finally have to drop the case," Dess says. "Do you think St. Claire will cry?"

Rex chuckles.

"So I've been looking at the maps," Dess says, changing the subject. "And — I mean, I've figured out the places, where midnight is stronger and weaker, where our powers might work differently. But I don't know what to do with that information. Yet," she says, pointedly, raising her eyebrows at Rex.

He gives a defeated sigh. "I'll keep looking," he says. "But this has never happened before, Dess. Midnight breaking down, going beyond Bixby. And with all the darklings gone, I can't even ask them."

"How much time do you think we have?" Dess asks. "The Days aren't going to wait forever. And the cops are going to have to close their case eventually."

Rex rubs a hand over his buzzed hair. It's grown out a little, but Dess still isn't used to seeing him like this. She'd forgotten that his hair is naturally light brown, or that he has a mole on his temple, right next to his ear.

Sometimes it feels like she's living in some kind of alternate universe, like the long midnight broke time down completely and snapped them back to before Jessica and Jonathan even came to Bixby — before Melissa got her license, when she and Rex took the bus with Dess. Before things between them had gotten so fraught and complex, when things had almost been...easy.

"I know," Rex says. "We have to keep looking. There has to be something. And maybe Melissa will taste another talent out there, someone who can fix this."

It doesn't seem like much to go on.

God, wasn't there a time when midnight was easy; when it was an extra hour to read or do calculations or hell, even just _sleep?_ When they had a world all to themselves, and they would bike to the park and climb onto the jungle gym that only cool kids were allowed to sit on, in the daylight hours? Dess remembers the thrill of hanging upside down on the monkey bars, where just twelve hours before Lauren Keller had told her to _go back to Transylvania, freak._

Well, that was middle school. That was a long time ago. Midnight's not that easy anymore. Nothing's that easy anymore.

 _How much time do we have?_ Dess had asked, and it doesn't escape her that Rex didn't quite answer the question.


	2. the middle where i stay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm gonna try to update this regularly, aiming for every friday/every other friday if i fall behind.
> 
> title is from "yellow cat slash red cat" by say anything.

The nightmare is the same as it always is.

They float over Edmond, the lights of Oklahoma City cold and frozen in the distance. Melissa still isn't used to seeing the world from this high up. It's dizzying in the best way. She's still not sure she likes being connected to Flyboy like this all the time, but he squeezes her hand when he catches wind of her thoughts. A spark of real, pure joy passes through their connection, and Melissa almost laughs.

They're chasing a taste that she had felt the other day, passing a bar in Oklahoma City. Just an odd, faint taste, one that she thought might resolve into something stronger once midnight fell.

It's still here, on her tongue. They might find it tonight.

Something stronger fills her mouth suddenly, and she turns to spit the taste into the air. A mild reaction of disgust comes from Jonathan, but she ignores him.

"Darklings," she says out loud, even though she doesn't have to.

She tugs him towards the rumble, trying to ignore the pressure building in her head, behind her eyes. They are _hungry_ , the darklings, so hungry and so close to their meal...

The girl looks different in all of Melissa's dreams. Sometimes she has dark hair and dresses all in black, like Melissa and Dess. Sometimes she smiles too much and wears sweaters twice her size, like Jessica. Melissa doesn't know what this girl actually looks like. She only knows that the midnighter was a girl from the jewelry she left behind.

She thinks she can see the shadowy form of her, running, looking for anyone to help her in the barren landscape. Jonathan and Melissa are too late. The taste of death spreads across Melissa's tongue right before the frenzy hits her: darklings feasting, thrilled to have found something alive in the blue time, a midnighter ignorant of her powers, of how to stop them; the girl's terror and pain.

Jonathan feels it, too, and loses control of their trajectory. They land hard on the ground, ankles twisting, and they can't get back up again, can't do anything but lie there and let it happen.

The nightmare jolts her awake. Melissa pushes herself up, rubbing her eyes. It's still dark outside — she squints at the glowing numbers on the motel clock. 5:22 AM.

Melissa relives this, every night. Relives the rotten taste of death on her tongue, the sight of the body — the bones the darklings picked nearly clean, only a few strips of flesh hanging from them.

The first midnighter they'd found. Their first failure.

The sheets of Flyboy's bed are kicked back. He's probably gone out for a walk. He's been doing that a lot, ever since Edmond.

Melissa wishes he wouldn't, and she hates it, hates how clingy and childish she feels. It's just that — she doesn't want to be alone with this memory.

She reaches out over the town where they're staying, merely out of habit. Weatherford, Oklahoma, falls just outside of the blue time; it's just a stopping place when they couldn't drive anymore.

Most people in town are still asleep; a bustling metropolis this is not. Melissa curls up in the chair next to the window, feeling strange and empty and lonely.

It's funny that all her life, all she's ever wanted was to get the hell out of Bixby. That town is the source of everything she hates — all those daylight thoughts, the pettiness of her classmates, the smarmy, smug grown-ups, the faint sense of decay that permeates Bixby and its secrets.

So much of her life has been defined by the agony she felt living there. And yet, now that it's been stripped away, she finds that she doesn't recognize the girl underneath it all. It's like she hasn't been a person, this whole time, she's just been a collection of primal reactions to her own fears.

Out here, miles away from her old life, Melissa realizes that she has no idea who she really is.

Which is pretty fucking depressing.

~

Flyboy comes back a little while later. He never stays out too long — partially because he's afraid of what Melissa might do if she's left alone, and partially because he doesn't want to be alone with his thoughts, either.

"Can't sleep?" he asks, dropping his key on the shaky table. No nice hotel will let two teenagers book a room without a credit card, and Melissa's at least seen enough TV procedurals to know that using a card on the run is a bad idea. This place is better than the last one, though. Melissa thinks she might be developing a phobia of bugs just like Rex.

"No," Melissa says. "You either, obviously."

They don't talk about Edmond. They _won't_ talk about it, by an unspoken agreement. Jonathan's not much for feelings, which has always been one of his better qualities.

Instead, he clears his throat. "Well, if we're both up," he says, "should we go?"

"Yeah, why not," Melissa grumbles, crawling out of the chair. She could use a shower first — that nightmare always makes her feel unclean.

Sharing a room with another person — with a _boy_ , not that she's worked up about that — but maybe she is, just because it is such a foreign concept — is getting easier. Flyboy notices her sometimes, his thoughts drifting into _what if_ territory, but he always brushes the thought away quickly, so Melissa doesn't hold it against him. If she's being honest, she thinks about him, too. Notices, and compares. Part of her thinks maybe this is practice, maybe she'll get used to the intimacy of hearing Jonathan spit his toothpaste into the sink, of hearing his breathing at night.

Maybe when this is over, when she sees Rex again, she'll be ready.

They leave without checking out, but it's not like anyone cares about that kind of thing here. They paid in cash, pretended to lose their IDs. The man at the front desk had slid the room keys over without batting an eye.

They're on the road in a few minutes. It's almost winter, and the sky is still dark, the desert a dark sea outside.

Melissa squints at the list of towns and coordinates Dess had given them before they left — not because she has trouble seeing in the dark, but because the polymath's handwriting is _terrible_. She should've gotten Jess to copy it for her. Jessica has nice handwriting. It's girly and bubbly in kind of an annoying way, but at least it's legible.

She might not ever see Jessica's stupid loopy handwriting ever again, and that makes her feel — something. And she doesn't want to think about that.

"Borger, right?" she says, like they haven't been over this a million times.

"Yeah."

They're heading west, which wasn't so much a discussion as Melissa suggesting it, and Flyboy grunting, "Sure." Melissa isn't afraid of large cities, exactly, but — she would rather drive towards the sparsely populated west, first, before heading to the east coast. No need for unnecessary distractions when they're trying to find new midnighters.

Maybe she is a little afraid, but she won't bring that up to Flyboy. Just like she won't bring up that he's afraid, too — the 36th parallel passes through North Carolina, a few hundred miles south of his old home, but some kind of old fear sparks in his mind whenever he thinks about going east.

So west it is.

Jonathan puts the radio on; Melissa puts her headphones on and lets the music wash over her, lets it take over her mind until she can't hear her own thoughts anymore.


	3. what's fucked up and everything's alright

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from "boulevard of broken dreams" by green day because i am 100% committed to this theme naming.

The Bixby High cafeteria serves turkey in November, trying to be festive. Like turkey is any less disgusting than the usual slop. Rex shuffles his tray along the line in the cafeteria, moving quickly. He learned back in middle school that pausing too long gives other people a reason to notice you, and being noticed is never a good thing. Besides, the choice today is between slimy corn and slimy green beans for the sides — it's not like he has to deliberate over it.

It's kind of a relief to be at school, even though Bixby High is just as crappy as ever, as crappy a place as any other high school in the world. Without Melissa, Rex feels like he's been cut adrift, without anything to anchor him. Math class makes him jumpy. English and science and French bore him — he probably should've taken Spanish, which is more useful here in Oklahoma, but he'd been going through a French Revolution phase when they were signing up for classes.

But it gives him something to do. _Routine_ , the doctor had told Mom, right after Dad's accident, right before she left. _Routine is good for him_. And he doesn't want to leave Dess alone.

He pays for his lunch with a crumpled five-dollar bill, and turns to head back to their table.

He walks right into a wall of a human instead. Timmy Hudson hasn't done more than glare at him in the halls in weeks, but some of his friends apparently didn't get the memo.

Mike Simmons is taller than Timmy; eye level with Rex. They stare at each other, and Rex envisions them as one of those Discovery Channel shows Dess likes so much: the apex predator of the high school cafeteria, facing a young challenger. If the challenger wins, he gets the respect of the herd. Or whatever.

"Hey, Spex," Mike says, shoving him hard in the shoulder. "Where's your _girlfriend?_ "

It's something like irony, Rex thinks, that for all they act like he's beneath their notice, they pay more attention to his life than his own mother does. He focuses over Mike's shoulder. He can see Dess across the cafeteria, waiting for the soda machine. Getting anything out of that machine is an exercise in patience, and he knows she'll be occupied for a while. He's on his own.

"Didn't you hear me?" Mike says, shoving him again. "Where're all your friends?"

Rex just looks away. That's none of Mike's business, for one. And he's still working on a truth that doesn't sound completely insane.

Mike grins, the cruel grin of someone who has a new insult and can't wait to use it. Rex has seen it often enough to tell.

"What happened to that redheaded chick? Did you freaks, like, sacrifice her?"

That is a blow that lands, and Rex can't help but flinch. _Weakness_ , the darkling part of him whispers, he ignores it. That's what they did, wasn't it? Sacrificed Jessica?

No, they can't think that. Jessica had told them so, and Melissa had tasted that she was telling the truth. She had made her choice on that roof, that night. And if it had been between getting stuck in the blue time and letting darklings loose in Bixby once a year, Jessica would make the same choice again.

It doesn't make things easier.

"I don't know what happened to her," Rex says coldly. "I wish I did."

He ducks past Mike before he can say anything else, speed-walking to the table. When he sits down, he inhales a deep breath. _You're okay_ , he thinks. He didn't lose control.

Dess comes back to the table, dumping her bag on the empty seat next to her and cracking her soda open. "Why so sad, Rexy?"

Rex squints at her. Some days he thinks Dess is quieter than normal. Other days, she acts like what happened on Samhain doesn't bother her at all.

Some strange, nagging part of Rex feels like he should ask, but it feels precarious somehow. He and Dess don't really talk about feelings.

"Nothing," he says, hesitating. "Mike Simmons is being an asshole. He thinks we have something to do with Jessica disappearing."

An expression that Rex can't place crosses Dess's face. "Don't we?" she asks.

Rex has been through this with St. Claire already, the same as Dess has. He's denied his own involvement a hundred times — denied that he and Jessica were anything more than friends, that he was with her or Jonathan or Melissa on Halloween night (technically not a lie; he was only with them between 11:59 and 12:01), that he had anything to do with the three disappearances after Samhain.

What else could they have done? He's wondered it a thousand times, alone in his quiet house. If Jessica hadn't put her hand in the lightning, the rip would've only grown. They never would've been able to stop it.

Jonathan blames him, he knows. Dess might, even though she won't say it out loud. They still don't get it, what it means to be the seer. What it's like to be the one to make these decisions. Rex hadn't known that releasing the lightning would've trapped Jessica in midnight. All he had known was that they had to stop the rip from growing.

He is the one that has to live with the knowledge that if it weren't for him, Jessica would still be with them. Isn't that how it always goes? It's him, always. He can almost hear his mother's voice, _If you weren't always reading those damn books, your father wouldn't get so upset_.

"I mean, I don't think he was referring to us stopping a rip in a secret hour that he can't see," Rex says dryly.

Dess just shakes her head. There it is, that un-Desslike silence, the bitterness that's something different from her usual sarcasm.

 _Are you okay?_ Rex thinks he should ask, but the words don't come out, and they eat lunch in silence.

~

The little red flag on the rusty mailbox is up when he gets home. The hinges squeal when he opens the box to grab the mail, and Rex idly wonders if he should do something about that. Do people oil their mailboxes? Is that a thing? Rex cleans the house sometimes — throws away food when it grows mold and wipes gunk off the sinks — but he knows the lawn's dying and there's a leak in the porch roof. He doesn't know what to do about that.

Dad used to do that kind of thing, before his accident — the only thing the old bastard was good for. He used to make Rex stand next to him and pass him power tools, and then yell at him when Rex was afraid to crawl under the sink or couldn't lift himself onto the roof.

Junk, bills, Dad's disability check, bills, junk. Angie hasn't written back yet, if she's found any connection to the blue time in her research on the Solutrean link.

Dad is parked in front of the TV, where he always is. His second round of pills has to be taken soon. Rex sets the egg timer in the kitchen to ring when it's ready, then goes to his room to work on his homework.

He feels a little twinge when he sees the formulas decorating the cover of his math textbook, but the numbers don't feel as though they're stabbing into his head anymore. He might be able to start doing his homework on his own again. Not now, but soon.

He has a paper to write on Bleeding Kansas for AP history. That, at least, he can handle. Rex hums to himself as he pulls out the books he's borrowed from the school library to start his research.

He's been lost in happy, research-related thoughts for a while when the phone rings. Rex looks up from his homework, then scrapes his chair back to go answer.

It's probably a telemarketer — or worse, his mom calling to make stilted small talk before letting him know that she's coming up for the weekend. He shouldn't even bother picking it up.

But then he thinks, _Maybe it's Melissa_ , and hope blooms in his chest before he has the chance to stop it.

She's called once, and he knows that they've only been gone a few weeks, so it's not as though that's a particularly low number, percentage-wise. (See? He can think about percentages now. Dess would be so proud.) But he used to see her every day, talk to her all the time. His world feels wrong without her in it.

He picks up the phone. "Hello?"

"Hi," comes a voice on the other end. It's not Melissa's, and Rex hates that this still disappoints him.

The voice is high-pitched and girlish — not Angie's pack-a-day rasp, or his mom's harried tone. It sounds like a kid, actually. "Is Rex there?"

"Speaking," Rex says. "Who's this?" He knows the Grayfoots have his phone tapped now — but with half of them cleared out of town, would they even bother listening?

"Beth," the voice says. "I'm Jessica's sister?"

"Oh. Uh, hi. What's up?"

"Well..." Beth sighs. "Okay, there's no non-weird way to put this. You're looking for a way to help Jess, right?"

Guilt curls up in Rex's stomach. Yes, he's been looking — but there's nothing to find. Every piece of lore is another dead end, and he doesn't even know if he can trust the lore anymore, not after what Angie told him. Maybe there's nothing. Maybe Jessica is really stuck forever, and they can't do a damn thing about it.

"Yeah, of course we are," he says.

"Okay, 'cause I was thinking...well, Cassie and I were thinking —"

Great. That's just what they need, two eighth-graders poking around the blue time.

"— that we could help. We went on a field trip to the library in Tulsa today — the main one — and we found these books that seemed kind of interesting. We didn't have time to look through all of them, but we're gonna go back to see if there's anything useful in there. Can we meet at the library? And talk?"

Rex remembers, suddenly, that Angie had found evidence of the old midnighters' wrongdoing in the Tulsa archives, not here in Bixby. It's worth a shot, and he can't bring himself to say no to Jessica's little sister. Not when she's lost so much.

"Yeah, I guess," he says. "When?"

"Friday?" she asks. "I have band practice the rest of the week."

Well, it's not like he has anything better to do on a Friday night. "Sure."

"Okay. I'll see you then, I guess."

"Wait," Rex says. Objections are rolling through his head, the gravity of the situation reminding him that letting two thirteen-year-olds get involved is a very bad idea. But when he opens his mouth, only one question comes out: "How did you even get my number, anyway?"

"It was in my sister's planner." Beth's voice has a significant undertone of _duh_. "I went into her room and looked through her stuff."

Rex is beginning to see why Jess calls her sister a sneak.


	4. city of sleepless people

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> title from "daydreaming" by paramore.

The exit for Borger takes Jonathan by surprise, and he yanks his father's car across three lanes to get to it.

"Christ, Flyboy," Melissa says, jolted awake. "I thought you were supposed to be the good driver here."

Jonathan just grunts in response. All the highways blur together, and it's not like there are enough people on this stretch of road for it to make a difference.

Besides, if he can't yell at Rex, then driving like an asshole is the closest thing to getting out his aggression.

Well, no, not aggression. Jonathan doesn't really do aggression, or confrontation, or anything like that. He just feels...too much. There's too much inside of him, too many words that he doesn't know how to put in order so that they make sense.

He knows he has to forgive Rex, at some point. Jessica already has. She can be so...so much _like_ Rex, sometimes — obsessively rational, always worrying over what makes the most sense, what has to be done.

And Jonathan knows — he does know, deep down — that it had to be done. No matter how much he wants to fly, no matter how much he wishes Jess were back — he knows they saved the town from becoming darkling meat. Saved the world, maybe.

But it's just so like Rex to offer someone else up as a sacrifice. He thinks he's some chessmaster, moving them all around like they're pawns, means to an end — not people, not his friends. Would Rex have sent Melissa into that lightning bolt? It's funny, but somehow Jonathan doesn't think so.

They chased the Grayfoots into the desert — twice — to save Rex. But they won't do the same for Jessica.

Jonathan knows this, too.

It's good to be out on the road, leaving Bixby and all its sorrow in the dust behind them. He had known, in the days after Samhain, that he couldn't stay. Dad had tried to _talk_ to Jonathan, that first day after — a serious, sit-down talk, the kind he gave Jonathan after Mom left.

Jonathan had been hoping he would never have to talk with Dad like that again. He's never wanted to fly away more in his life, listening to Dad go on about their move to Bixby, about Jonathan's friends. He'd felt trapped, weighed down by Dad's expectations, his disappointment.

Dad kept trying to suggest that Jonathan find an outlet. In Philadelphia, he'd played basketball — recruited solely because he'd been the tallest of the sixth-grade boys, really. Dad thought he might want to do that again. But what's a jump in basketball compared to flying at midnight?

Eventually, it got to be too much. They had to go, get the hell out of town, find the other midnighters.

Except they're not doing too great at that, either. Jonathan grips the steering wheel hard, focusing on the curve of the road as they get off the interstate. He knows Melissa thinks about it — how can she not? — but they don't talk about it. This, too, is too much, too many feelings that Jonathan doesn't know what to do with.

He's never seen anyone die like _that_. Anathea's death had been horrible, yes, but it had been quiet — a girl who died decades ago, essentially, giving out her last breath on the salt flats. Nothing like what he had felt through his connection with Melissa — the terror, the violence.

Jonathan inhales a deep breath. Maybe they should've stayed in Bixby, after all.

"If we stayed in Bixby, you'd be in jail," Melissa points out.

Oh, right, there's that, too. St. Claire had practically been rubbing his hands together in glee while he questioned Jonathan about Jessica Day's disappearance. Since Jonathan is pretty sure the Bixby police are never going to get near the actual truth, it was probably only a matter of time before they chose him as a scapegoat. Another reason to bail.

Borger, Texas, sits at the intersection of 36 degrees north and 100 west — not exactly prime darkling material, Jonathan thinks, but then they pass the sign indicating the town limits.

_Population 13,000._

Well, that's not ominous at all.

~

The first thing they do when they get to a new town is eat. Jonathan says that driving makes him hungry, and Melissa just rolls her eyes, because _breathing_ makes Jonathan hungry, as she heard Jessica think once. She's hungry, too, though, since they basically spent breakfast driving through the Oklahoma panhandle.

Jonathan slows as they exit off the highway. Low buildings come into view, forming a town center as they drive in. The town is clear and focused — buzzy little kids' minds at school and adults at work. A few floating tastes of boredom and unemployment — a few people at the bar on the town's outskirts, getting drunk at noon — kids in a car a few streets over, playing hooky to do nothing but sit around and smoke weed. It's not much different than Bixby.

Jonathan parks the car on the main street — this town is so small that they don't even have meters — and they wander towards a diner.

The waitress has a beehive and an attitude. "Didn't know school let out so early," she says, not handing them menus.

"We're just passing through," Jonathan says.

The waitress huffs, but gives them the menus and leaves them to it.

At this time on a weekday, the diner is nearly empty. Actually, it is empty. Isn't it?

Melissa frowns, staring at the menu, even though it's the same greasy all-American fare you can find back home in Oklahoma. She hates eating meat — too many potential phantom tastes, whether she's imagining them or not — so she's going to get grilled cheese, which is what she always gets. Flyboy will get what _he_ usually gets, which is half the menu.

There. While she contemplates their respective greasy-food habits, she sees someone out of the corner of her eye — sitting in the back corner. The waitress is taking their order, blocking the person from view.

Melissa whips around to get a better look, but when she looks at the corner booth, no one is there. Not even the waitress.

No way. The waitress is _definitely_ over there; Melissa just saw her. And she can see the kitchen from behind the counter; the waitress isn't there, either.

"Flyboy," she says quietly, "do you see the waitress?"

"Um." His eyes flick briefly to the side. "Yeah. She's right over there."

"Okay. Don't look too hard, but is she talking to someone?"

Flyboy turns to look, and Melissa grabs his sleeve. "I said _don't_ look!"

"O...kay." He frowns. "Yeah, I think so. She's taking the order of whoever's in that booth."

Melissa exhales. "That's what I thought. But there's no one there."

"How does that even work?"

"I don't know. I just —" She chews her lip, wondering if she's just going crazy. How can someone be there, but not? She turns around, but just like before: the booth is empty.

Maybe she's imagining it. The waitress brings her grilled cheese and Jonathan's burger and fries and chicken and a waffle.

"So," Jonathan says, eating five fries at once. "What do you think?"

Melissa shrugs, looks out the window at the empty street outside. "Tastes like diet Bixby." These new places where the blue time comes, they haven't been infested by darklings long enough to develop the undercurrent of decay that Bixby has — but she can taste something here, a growing darkness. This place will need midnighters, soon enough.

"Sounds gross," Jonathan says, indelicately eating another handful of fries. Melissa rolls her eyes. Flyboy isn't one to be talking about _gross_.

A thought tickles at her mind that they were talking about something before, but she can't think of what it was. Was it about — no, not Edmond. They don't talk about Edmond. Maybe it was something dumb, like how depressing all the scenery west of Oklahoma is.

Oh, well. It'll come to her later.

Jonathan inhales his food and Melissa finishes her sandwich. They pay with cash they stole from a gas station one midnight, then leave to go kill time until the secret hour.

Outside of the diner is a cluster of newspaper stands, those crooked boxes that unlock when you drop a quarter in. Someone paid for the _Amarillo Globe-News_ and then apparently decided that it wasn't worth it, because the paper is lying on top of the stand.

Melissa picks up the newspaper and freezes. "Jonathan, look."

 _Remains of Oklahoma slaying victim identified_ , announces the headline.

_Ashley Larkin, 21, was a senior at the University of Oklahoma. Originally from Los Angeles, Larkin moved to Norman to study meteorology at OU. She had been visiting a friend in Edmond at the time of her death..._

"Is that our midnighter?" Jonathan asks quietly.

Melissa stares at the photo. Twenty-one, the article said, but she looks so young. Not much older than Melissa herself. Her eyes are rimmed with black eyeliner, and she's wearing a black dress, her mouth quirked up in a wry half-smile. Even though this is the first time Melissa's seeing her, she looks so familiar that something inside Melissa hurts.

She puts her hand in her pocket, her fist curling around the pendant she's been carrying there. They'd salvaged the jewelry from the body, a cheap steel heart on a chain masquerading as silver. Melissa doesn't know what had compelled her to take it — she's not a grave robber or anything, she hopes — only that it felt wrong for the jewelry to be left there. It doesn't look like weaponry or a last line of defense. It looks like it might've been a gift, sentimental — proof that someone cared about her.

In the photo, the same pendant hangs around Ashley Larkin's neck, a heart shape in grainy black-and-white.

"Yeah, I think so," she says quietly.

"We should go to LA," Jonathan says.

Melissa blinks. "What?"

He shrugs uncomfortably, the tastes of guilt and regret building on Melissa's tongue. "Well, you know. It's only a few hours south of the 36th parallel, and we're the only ones that know what happened to her. Maybe we can...I don't know. Find her parents. Give them closure."

The kind of closure Anathea's family never had. The kind Jessica's family is desperately waiting for. He doesn't say these things out loud, but Melissa knows.

So she nods her agreement. "Sounds good."


	5. everybody else's girl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from "girl" by tori amos. also as mentioned, i had jessica stay in bixby because how were they planning to go on a cross-country road trip with someone who only exists for one hour when there's no electricity? how? i have questions, dudes.

This must be what stiffs feel like, Jessica thinks.

They meet in Madeleine's house nowadays, because Rex has taken it upon himself to look after her. It's good for them to have a permanent meeting place, anyway — it's hard for Rex and Dess to keep track of Jessica, remember where they'd last met and where to find her again. There's a lot you forget to think about, in twenty-four hours.

It's too strange, sometimes. For Jessica, no time has passed, she hasn't moved at all — yet every hour, the other two jump suddenly to a different place, wearing different clothes. Sometimes they disappear entirely. The clock is always at midnight, as though it's frozen, so this is the only way she can mark the passage of time now.

God, it sucks. She doesn't want it to, doesn't want to dwell on how awful it is — but it _sucks_. She's almost become like Madeleine herself now, trapped here in this crepuscular contortion. At least she's not entirely alone — yet. But Jessica doesn't like to think about that.

Despite their best efforts, though, they don't always remember exactly where Jessica was the night before, and sometimes they appear right under her.

"Oops," Jessica says as she lands on Dess, the girl appearing from seemingly nowhere. Jessica knows that from their perspective, _she's_ the one coming out of nowhere. "Hi, Dess."

"Hey, you," Dess says, smiling just a little.

Jessica curls up next to her, glad that Dess lets her press their shoulders together, that she doesn't comment on how clingy Jessica is. Dess smells like she's been soldering — like smoke and metal. It's weirdly comforting. Jess wants to put her arms around the polymath, but figures that would be weird.

Jess hadn't realized how much she relied on the solidity of her sister, her parents — the comfort of their touch, the knowledge that she was surrounded and loved. She feels starved for it. Now, the only people she can touch, who feel warm and real, are the other midnighters. Jessica's tried, but she really can't picture herself hugging Rex.

Speaking of, the seer is sitting across from her, in one of Madeleine's heinous overstuffed chairs. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "How are you doing, Jess?"

From her perspective, he asks her the same question every hour, but she doesn't have the heart to point this out to him. Instead, she shrugs a shoulder. "The same as usual, I guess. How are you guys?"

She feels Dess's head shift as the polymath and Rex exchange glances. Well, that never means anything good.

"Good," Rex says carefully. "We haven't heard from Melissa and Jonathan in a few days, but…"

"They haven't found anyone yet, huh?" Jessica asks. She never knows how much Dess and Rex aren't telling her—how much they actually don't want her to know, and how much just slips their minds when they see her.

"No," Dess says. "But I guess it makes sense. Six billion people on the planet, right? If you have to be born within a half-second of midnight, that's sixty-nine thousand people worldwide. In the United States? That's three thousand, four hundred and fifty people. And some of them are probably babies or really old."

"Plus, there are over thirty thousand towns in the country, officially," Rex adds. "There are probably towns where there aren't midnighters at all."

Jessica suppresses a sigh. Having two human search engines for friends can be a pain in the ass.

"Of course…" Rex starts, then trails off. He shrugs. "It'll probably just take some time."

"How long have they been gone?" Jessica asks.

Rex and Dess exchange glances again. Yeah, yeah, make fun of the girl who only exists for an hour a day. Sometimes she loses track of time, okay?

"Almost a month now," Rex says, his voice a little strangled. Missing Melissa, Jessica knows.

She should miss Jonathan, but it's hard to when it seems like it's only been a day or two since she last saw him. It's hard to even remember that he and Melissa are gone, off exploring the 36th parallel. She'd wanted to go with them, but it wasn't possible — how the hell were they going to drive cross-country when she only exists for the one hour when the car doesn't work?

Besides, they'll be fine, Jessica hopes. Jonathan can still jump faster than any darkling, and Melissa is growing stronger every day. They don't _need_ her — not for rumbles, anyway.

One month. Jessica vaguely remembers, during one of Dess's mathy rambles, that darklings age about a day every few weeks, like werewolves in mythology. So she's a day older now, finally, than she was on Samhain. In a few hundred months — what's that, like twenty years? — she'll be able to get her driver's license. Yay.

Instead of saying any of that, she just says, "Oh." Next to her, she can feel Dess stiffen. Dess has done that math for sure.

Rex clears his throat awkwardly. "I have to go check on Madeleine." He pulls a thermos out of his bag and goes upstairs to feed the old mindcaster, the old wood creaking under his weight.

"I can't believe he's still babysitting her," Dess says, her voice dry. She gives Jess's arm a gentle squeeze, in surprising contrast to how bitter she sounds.

Jessica looks up at the dark staircase. "Maybe he feels responsible." Rex and Melissa never said exactly what had happened that night at Madeleine's house, but it's not like it's a huge leap to assume her sudden silence has to do with them.

In the quiet of the crepuscular contortion, Jessica allows herself to think this: it's probably for the best, that Rex stayed behind in Bixby. Her freshman psych class last year had had a chapter on _codependency_ , and if that doesn't describe Rex and Melissa to a T…

Dess shifts away from her, standing up, and Jessica feels suddenly cold from the polymath's distance. So maybe she's not one to talk.

"So, Jess," Dess says. "Anything you want to know about life at Bixby High? We just had a pop quiz in trig today. Thrilling stuff."

"Yeah, missing trig is killing me," Jessica says. "Please save me from this nightmare so I can go back to my _other_ nightmare of failing out of school."

Dess laughs, her face lighting up for a moment. "I swear you're not missing anything," she says.

She means it to be comforting, Jess knows, but it doesn't change the fact that she's _wrong_. Jessica is missing everything, she is missing twenty-four hours of the real world every day. She is missing seeing her little sister grow up — she'll miss Beth's eighth grade graduation. Her friends are going to grow old and leave her behind. What does Dess know about missing any of that?

"I'm gonna go look at the paper," Jess says, turning away so Dess can't see her face.

She's never been a morning-news kind of person, but the newspaper is the only way she can keep up with anything anymore. Jess wonders if it's slightly masochistic to keep looking for information about a world that she can't live in anymore, but she figures it's better to be informed.

The _Bixby Register_ gets thrown on Madeleine's front walk every morning. Some nights, when Dess and Rex leave early or they can't come by, Jess reads it to entertain herself for the rest of the hour. She now knows way more about the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State football rivalry than she ever wanted to in her life.

She opens the door, eyes scanning the horizon for darklings out of habit. There aren't any, of course. Haven't been since Samhain. It seems a pity to have lightning trapped in her hand and not even be able to use it, except as a mini-flashlight so she can read in the dark.

She flips the newspaper open as she crosses the room to sit back down on the couch. Oil news, football news, high school news—half a paragraph on the war in Iraq—half a paragraph on the hurricane—the Jenks debate team is going to state—and there's been a murder in Edmond. Jesus.

Jessica's eyes scan the murder article, because it's more interesting than anything else in the paper. _Ashley Larkin, 21, was identified as the victim of a murder in Edmond, Oklahoma on November 13th…_

November 13th. Jessica scrunches her face and tries to do some mental math. 11 and 13 adds up to…

"Hey, Dess," she says. "Come look at this."

Dess has been rearranging Madeleine's collection of metal, and she comes to sit by Jess again. "What's up?"

Jessica hands her the paper. "Murder in Edmond on the 13th."

Dess sucks in her breath, scanning the article. "The autopsy puts the time of death at midnight, too."

"Her body was…oh, gross." Jessica feels sick just reading the words. There isn't very much detail — the article isn't very long — but it's enough, enough to visualize, enough to _know_. So this is what darklings do to people.

"Sounds like a darkling attack," Dess confirms quietly. "We have to show this to Rex."

Jessica looks up at the staircase again, not wanting to go up there and see Madeleine. Dess follows her gaze, then rustles the paper away. "I'll show him tomorrow."

Right. In the twenty-four hours that Jess won't see them. In the time that they'll spend together, go to school together, laugh and talk about a hundred things that they'll forget about by the time they see her again.

She looks at Dess and feels something like longing. She wishes Dess would say something uncharacteristic and sappy, unlikely as it is. She wishes Dess would say that she misses her.

But Dess's gaze slides away from her and silence hangs awkward and heavy between them. Finally it's too much for Jess, and she changes the subject, hating that she is the one to give in first. "Shouldn't Jonathan and Melissa have found her? The midnighter girl?"

Dess shrugs. "If they didn't get to her in time? They left only a few days before she died. They might've just been…too late."

The words send a shiver through Jess. _Too late._ It feels like such an impossibility. They saved Cassie Flinders. They saved Bixby. But this girl — they didn't even know until the story appeared in the newspaper. Maybe she's not the only one. Maybe there are other midnighters dying out there right now.

"What do we do?" she asks hollowly.

Dess is quiet. "I don't know."

Jessica has never really thought of Dess as small (even though she's the shortest of all of them, to be honest) — but she looks small right now, curled up on Madeleine's sofa. Her dark hair has slipped in front of her face, hiding whatever she might be thinking. Jessica feels the urge to get clingy with her again, and presses her hands together until it passes. Maybe a hug would fix everything with Beth, or with her friends back in Chicago, but Dess isn't like that.

Dess takes out her homework and props it on her knees. She tells Jess about their classes and how Mr. Sanchez wants to start a Mathletes club, which Dess supports on principle but will never join because she categorically refuses to: one, participate in a school activity, and two, ever call herself a _mathlete_.

Hearing about the outside world hurts a little, but it's better than the silence when they don't talk. The air is still outside, and Rex must be sitting in Maddy's room, because Jess can't hear the sound of his boots on the wood floors at all. When they don't talk, the silence wraps around them, and it makes Jessica's skin crawl. She's never known quiet like this.

Finally, when Dess is halfway through her English homework — which Jessica would help her with, if it were possible to read Dess's handwriting — a creak comes from the stairs above them, and Rex comes down.

"Madeleine is doing okay," he says, even though neither of them asked. "She's talking."

Dess rolls her eyes at that. Jessica wonders what exactly Madeleine is saying, and if it has anything to do with Rex and Melissa.

Rex says, "We'd better go. See you tomorrow, Jess."

"See you tomorrow," Jessica says, even though she knows no time will pass for her at all.


	6. out there in the dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title is from nothing, i couldn't find a suitable song so i had to make a chapter title up by myself. literally the hardest part of this chapter tbh.

The wait for midnight always starts the same way — Melissa sitting on the roof of his car, ready to cast, Jonathan trying to get all of his nervous energy out while he waits for gravity to lift away.

Jonathan shifts from foot to foot, drumming his fingers on the roof. The last twelve hours have been exhausting. Borger is just as unrelentingly small and constricting as Bixby, and he feels the familiar pressure building inside of him, pressing against his ribs — _out, out_ , the desire to be free of small towns and gravity and everything tying him to the earth.

"I can't wait for midnight," Melissa says. Jonathan doesn't know if she was reading his thoughts, or if she just happened to be thinking the same thing.

Jonathan laughs. "You always say that."

"So do you," she shoots back. "But I mean it. There's something weird about this town. I want to find it."

"I thought you said it was diet Bixby," Jonathan says.

"Yeah," she says. Melissa tilts her head, frowning. "There's something else, though. It's clearer now that it's late. Something…"

She starts to sway a little, and Jonathan watches nervously, hoping she won't fall off the car. Part of him is a little worried that he's supposed to fill Rex's role — watching Melissa, calming her down when she's upset, holding her back when she's about to accidentally walk into traffic. He doesn't know how to be that person, even for himself.

"Quit worrying and let me cast," Melissa says.

Right. She needs quiet — both real and of the mind-noise variety.

Jonathan inhales a deep breath through his nose, looking out at the faint lights of the town. They're parked on the highest point in town — a little hill that rises over a housing development. The houses are already dark. This town goes to sleep early.

Blue washes over Borger, and Jonathan feels the suffocating weight of gravity finally lift away. He bounces gently, floating a few feet off the ground, while he waits for Melissa get her bearings.

She hums a little, tipping back and forth. "This place is weird, Jonathan."

"You said that," he says, starting to feel a little nervous.

"I just…crap." She turns and spits over the other side of his car. Jonathan's glad he's never harbored any particular illusions about Melissa being delicate, because if he had, she would be ruining them right about now. "Something is out there, but I can't taste it. It's like my tongue itches or something, it's so—" She sucks in a deep breath. "It's like it's hiding from me somehow."

Jonathan exhales a slow breath. It has never occurred to him that Melissa's powers could be blocked, apart from hiding out in contortions of the craptacular whatever. If darklings can hide from her, they're really screwed.

In the backseat, their weaponry glints in the light of the blue moon, and he starts pulling steel objects out, naming them as he tosses them to Melissa, who puts them in a bag.

A marching band baton donated by Jessica's sister. "Acquisitional."

A set of steel calligraphy nibs, meant for throwing. "Concentration, Consecutively, Commemoration, Comprehending, Colorizations."

An old pipe with a bend that, according to Dess, is exactly at an angle of 104 degrees. "Heliographers."

After he's named an assortment of washers and screws and steel wires, he picks up their bag of weaponry and slings it crosswise over his body. Then he holds his hand out to Melissa. She grasps it, and he feels the subtle jolt of their connection opening up, all of Melissa's thoughts flowing into him. It's no longer the uncontrolled frenzy of their first touch, like a fire hydrant exploding — it is calm and collected now, a steady flow like one of the slow creeks near his house in Bixby. She is worried about what they're going to find tonight — still reeling from what they saw in the newspaper — relieved to have left Bixby — quietly missing Rex. Jonathan feels all these things in her, and he squeezes her hand.

They jump hard off the hill, floating over the town. Jonathan surveys the landscape below them, calculating the safest place to come down — there are the flat roofs of gas stations and small warehouses, the peaks of houses, stretches of flat dusty land. His acrobat's vision lays out the paths between the houses, the way they curve around the streets.

A chirp sounds, and Jonathan squeezes Melissa's hand in surprise. It's just a slither, he realizes after a moment. He scans the horizon, trying to find out where it came from.

More and more chirps join it, and Jonathan sees them: nearly blending in with the dark trees, a cloud of slithers is rising up. A full shudder goes through Jonathan's body. Swarms of slithers always remind him of a Biblical plague or something.

 _You spent way too much time in church as a kid_ , Melissa thinks.

 _Just because_ you _mindcasted your parents to get out of it_ , Jonathan thinks back, scanning the landscape for escape routes. Even if they're just slithers, there are way too many of them for comfort.

The dark cloud gathers itself and begins to move towards them with a purpose, and he feels a spike of real panic. They jumped too hard, thinking they would only be looking over town; they won't be able to come down fast enough to run.

The slither hits him in the shoulder, a heavy, blunt pain that knocks him forward, jerking him and Melissa apart. She yanks off one of her necklaces and hurls it, and he sees blue sparks in the corner of his vision, blurred with pain.

He thrusts his hand into the bag to pass her Heliographers, and he takes Acquisitional for himself. He swings it to the side, in front of his face, like he's cutting through brambles in a path.

Except, of course, there isn't really a path, just them floating in the air, trying to come down.

Another slither bites at their joined hands, and more and more join it, focusing on all their efforts on separating Melissa and Jonathan. Jonathan grips Melissa's hand harder, but her fear of falling is rushing through him, drowning out his ability to think. He looks down, trying to find a place to land, but terror encroaches on the edge of his vision. He can't focus, all he can feel is vertigo and sickening terror that he is going to fall.

And then they both hit him at once — striking for his unprotected back and legs. Icy chills shoot through him. A third hits his chest, but his necklace repels it, leaving barely a sting.

Then a fourth hits tries for their hands again. Distracted by pain, by Melissa's fear, Jonathan lets go.

" _No!_ " he cries, but it's too late. A fall from their height won't kill her, but it'll definitely sprain something, maybe break a bone. She'll be easy prey on the ground, even for slithers.

They're abandoning him now, swooping down to follow their injured prey. From high up, Jonathan sees them. Two darklings are approaching, ready to eat the meal that the slithers have caught for them.

Jonathan is finally starting his descent, and he reaches into the bag, pulling out a handful of washers and screws. He pitches them into the dark mass on the ground, sending up blue sparks.

As he gets close, he can see that she's holding her own — blue sparks are flying everywhere, slithers sizzling on the ground. Melissa is on her feet, swinging Heliographers with her left hand. Her right arm dangles uselessly at her side.

Jonathan finally makes it back to earth, scattering the calligraphy nibs to clear a landing spot. He throws more weaponry to Melissa — she makes a grab for a pole with a length of filament wrapped around it with her good arm, but she misses it has to pick it up off the ground. This has the side effect of killing several slithers, at least.

Strangely, the rumble is easier on the ground. It seems like every hit kills several slithers at once, their screeches fading away as more and more of them drop to the desert floor.

When the two darklings land, it is almost silent again.

Jonathan drops their bag to the ground and extracts a necklace made of thirty-nine steel nuts looped on a wire, and passes it to Melissa. There's nothing left in there now except some more screws and bolts.

"Blasphemously Schizophrenic Reforestation," she says, the necklace sparking to life.

Jonathan picks up Heliographers — a little blackened from the rumble, but a few slithers shouldn't have killed it entirely. "Disappointing Dysfunctional...uh...Perfectionist."

The thirty-nine-letter name arcs lazily through the pipe, giving it enough juice, hopefully, to distract the darklings. All they need is enough time for Jonathan to get them back to the car and the perimeter of stakes they set up around it.

But the darklings don't move. They're simply crouched there, several yards away, their harsh breathing echoing around them.

"They're afraid," Melissa says.

"Of us?" Jonathan asks. "We're right here. They could take us."

"They saw how easily we took down all those slithers," Melissa says. "They think we're dangerous."

"Oh. But…" Jonathan doesn't know what to say. The slithers almost had them in the air, until they landed and they suddenly all turned into wimps.

"This is weird," Melissa whispers.

It feels like they stand there for an eternity, the darklings' cold eyes locked on them, none of them moving.

And then, slowly, the darklings step back. Wings grow out of their spines — God, Jonathan is _never_ going to get used to seeing that — and they rise up and fly away, leathery wings audibly beating in the air.

"What the hell?" he asks. "I've never seen that before. Have you? I mean —"

"Flyboy," Melissa says. "Shut up."

Her head is tipped back as she sniffs the air. She turns around, frowning.

"It's here," she says. "That weird taste. That weird —"

Her eyes open. They narrow. "Who the hell are _you?_ "

Jonathan blinks, following her gaze. Standing behind them, like she's been there this entire time, is a girl. Her dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail, glasses knocked askew on her face.

"Um," she says. "Hi."


	7. sing the words but don't know what it means

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from "i'm not okay (i promise)" by my chemical romance.
> 
> i took dess's screenname "dessometrical" from the fic [special topics in dessometrics](https://archiveofourown.org/works/530792) by mayhap, because it's a perfect screenname for dess and i couldn't improve on it.

Dess and Rex bike home from Madeleine's house in silence. Leaving Jess always feels strange and wrong — like they should wait for her, like she's just a little bit behind them. But she's not. Dess has to remember that. She's probably fading away right now, going to that weird limbo that she occupies for twenty-four hours of the day.

Dess wonders what it must feel like to fade out of existence. She hasn't gotten up the nerve to ask Jess. It's probably insensitive to ask, no matter how badly Dess wants to know.

She thinks of the way Jess had curled up against her, how she'd rested her head on Dess's shoulder, her red hair tickling Dess's neck. Maybe if Jess wasn't a midnighter, they wouldn't be friends — but she is, and they are, and Dess can't pretend that she doesn't care what she thinks.

Dess looks over at Rex, wondering if he feels weird about leaving Jessica, too. He probably doesn't. Jessica's not Melissa — she's expendable. They probably all are, to Rex. Dess remembers his dry casualness about all the people that would die on Samhain.

The secret hour ends as they pull up to Rex's house. The silence is suddenly broken by the whistle of the Oklahoma wind, the chill biting through Dess's jacket and tights. A shutter on the house next door bangs suddenly, and Dess jumps so hard she nearly falls off her bike.

Rex laughs dryly. "Watch out for the Guddersons' house."

"Your neighbors are the worst."

Rex squints at her. "Don't you live down the street from a guy who sells drugs?"

"Uh, no," Dess says. "They arrested him last year."

They stand awkwardly for a moment. Finally Rex says, "Are you, uh — are you gonna get home okay?"

Dess shrugs. "I've been getting home by myself for years."

"Yeah, but that was before…"

Before everything got so complicated, Dess knows. Before they found out what kind of things are really out there.

But what is Rex going to do, anyway? Bike her home? That'll just put him at risk of getting busted for breaking curfew.

And there are things Rex will risk himself for, but not her. Probably not Jess, either.

She pulls her jacket tighter around her. "I'll see you, Rex."

~

Dess goes to the computer lab after school. Rex is in the library — her mom is coming to pick them both up after work. She hadn't sounded too happy about it when Dess had called her work from the school pay phone, but whatever.

Dess has a paper to write on _Lord of the Flies_ , and there's a football game on tonight, so she doesn't want to be home for that. Dad gets _loud_ during games — loud when his team is winning, louder when they're losing. So she has to write up her paper here. She pulls out her outline, wishing she could just drop English. It's not that hard for her, but it doesn't come as easily as math. Dess doesn't do symbolism.

The lab is nearly empty — it's always busiest in the morning, when everyone is rushing to print out their homework. There's just a few kids doing research or typing up papers. The computer club is gathered around one computer, geeking out over code or whatever. Not that Dess blames them, but as with Mathletes, the idea of being involved in a school activity makes her skin crawl.

She opens up a new document and stares at the screen, the cursor blinking on the blank page. How can she focus on this?

Curiosity gets the better of her, and she opens the Internet instead. Slowly, the school's homepage loads in little pixelated blocks, and Dess goes to search for the Halloween incident.

The Bixby Register doesn't have a website, but the newspaper up in Tulsa does. They've posted an update on the incident, one month later: two more bodies have been identified. Several people, including three minors, are still missing. They don't give names, but Dess knows one of those minors is Jessica.

The comments are all the same — people insisting that there are drugs in the county water supply, that someone outside of town has been raising wild animals that got loose. People claim to have been in Bixby that night — some of them get it right, saying that they saw the world turn blue and saw nightmarish creatures in the air. Others are clearly making shit up.

Most of the comments are old, from when the article was originally posted. But there's one new one. Dess scrolls down to look at it, leaning closer to the screen like that will help her understand the words better.

_this happens in tennessee, too. you're not special._

First of all, rude as hell. It hadn't occurred to Dess, when they'd first realized that the blue time had spread, that one of the consequences of more midnighters is the potential for jerky midnighters.

Tennessee. Dess tries to remember the list of cities she'd given Melissa and Flyboy before they'd left town. She can see the coordinates perfectly in her head — the lines of the darkling superhighway that now cuts through the country, bright circuit nodes of cities and towns in its path. But the names elude her. Ugh.

She turns back to the page. Whoever wrote the comment only left their name as Guest. There's no other information — the website doesn't publish emails or anything like that.

Still. It feels like _something_ — they might have found another midnighter. Maybe they can warn this person about the darklings before someone else dies. But how? She can't hack into the newspaper's website — she's not that good (yet). Besides, Rex would want to know about it if Dess were to try to find this person.

He hadn't been happy when she showed him the newspaper, obviously. "You think it's darklings?" he had asked.

Dess had rolled her eyes. "Is there something else it could be? Jess thinks it is, too," she'd added.

Rex had chewed his lip. "Let's see if Jonathan and Melissa call us with anything. If midnighters are really dying out there, they'll know."

It still stings, a little — a lot, maybe — that he still trusts Melissa's word over hers.

She goes back to her essay, trying to focus on the meaning of the conch and the pig's head instead. They'll find this person — maybe — eventually — won't they? Just like they'll deal with the midnighters dying, and Jess being trapped, and Flyboy and Melissa on the run…

Screw it. She looks at the clock. She has ten minutes before Mom gets here.

Dess opens up the Internet again, biting a nail as she waits for the Tulsa Metro News site to load. She finds Guest's comment and clicks "Reply."

_Oh yeah? What do you know about it?_

_dessometrical@gmail.com._

Then she closes the window before she can consider the enormity of what she's just done.

~

They pile quietly into the car; Dess in the front, Rex behind her. Dess can feel his knees pressing into the back of her seat.

Mom adjusts the rearview mirror, smiling tiredly at Rex. "Hi, Rex. How've you been?"

"Okay," Rex says, which is true as far as Dess can tell. "School keeps me pretty busy."

"Right," Mom says absently. "Do you like your classes?"

Dess tries not to cringe. Mom hates small talk, and Rex hates small talk, and Dess hates listening to them try to make small talk, but for some reason they're all doing it anyway because it's socially expected of them.

She realizes this is the first time Rex has ever been around her parents — for any significant amount of time — without Melissa. Maybe her mom will revert back to being suspicious of him without the bitch goddess around to plant ideas in her mind.

Dess remembers how Madeleine prodded her mother to give _birth_ at midnight, and feels an odd sort of protectiveness come over her. Dess and her mom aren't really that close — Dad wanted a son; Mom wanted a daughter who likes parties and the color pink — but the idea of mindcasters messing with her mom's head bothers her.

 _Well, Mom, now we've finally got something in common_ , she thinks dryly.

But no, Mom and Rex are getting along just fine. Rex says that everything at home is fine, fine — yes, his mom still visits (like, once a month, Dess knows but doesn't say), he's taking care of everything just fine on his own. When they arrive at his house, Rex gives her mom a jaunty little wave from his porch before going inside, which is kind of overkill, in Dess's opinion. She's definitely going to make fun of him for that later. Mocking Rex is easy, maybe easier than sitting down and asking him why the hell he never listens to her.

"Are you two doing okay without your other friends?" Mom asks as they pull away from the Greene house.

Dess starts a little, not expecting this turn in the conversation. "What? Yeah, no, we're fine. I mean — " she decides to throw her mom a bone " — it's weird without the others, but Rex and I are good."

Mom clears her throat. "You know, if something's going on…"

"Nothing's going on."

Mom fiddles awkwardly with the radio, flipping between oldies and the traffic report. "Well, I'm just making sure you're all right. I know you and that Jessica girl were close."

 _Actually, that was because we could both see a hidden dimension when time freezes. Not much in common other than that._ Then Dess realizes that she's thinking of Jess in the past tense and winces.

"I didn't know her that well," Dess says instead.

"Me and your dad were happy when you invited her over. It's good see you make new friends."

Translation: friends who wear pastels and smile freakishly often.

"Yeah, well. That's over now."

"I'm sure they'll find out what happened to her. That whole Halloween night was just so strange. Nothing like that has ever happened here."

 _Understatement_ , Dess thinks. She's remembering why she doesn't get rides home from Mom that often: she tries to bond with Dess every now and then, and it's always deeply uncomfortable.

They pull up to the house, and Mom sighs when she sees Dad's car in the driveway. "I'd better get dinner ready." She reaches out and ruffles Dess's hair, something she hasn't done since Dess was little. "You know, Desdemona, you can tell me if you're going through a hard time."

"You made my life a hard time when you named me Desdemona," Dess says, rolling her eyes. Then she pauses, willing herself not to be sarcastic with her mother. "Sorry, Mom. I'm just trying to…get through it."

For a second, she thinks Mom might hug her, but thank God she's not that far gone yet. Instead, Mom just pats Dess's hand, and they go into the house together.


	8. the futile outweighs the beautiful

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lmao i thought i could update this regularly but life is too hectic now that i'm not in school anymore, wah. i am 500% committed to actually finishing this fic though!
> 
> notes: i totally jacked megan's power from the zeroes series by scott westerfeld, margo lanagan, and deborah biancotti. one of my fave things about the midnighters series is how non-standard the powers are, and i'm not creative enough to come up with one on my own, so i decided to steal it from another scott westerfeld book. also the zeroes series reminded me quite a lot of midnighters, so i thought some of the same powers would be fitting.
> 
> title is from "futile" by say anything.

They make it back to the car as the dark moon is setting, Jonathan dragging Melissa and the girl along. Melissa finds herself looking over constantly, trying to keep the girl in her mind. She's like a stray thought, the kind that float around, too faint to ever trace back to one person — always just _there_ , just out of reach. Like how Rex sees the world without his glasses.

If she looks at her long enough and really focuses, she can remember: this strange girl coming out of nowhere, standing in the middle of a swirl of darklings like it was nothing. Who the hell is she?

Blue washes away, the world turning dark and gray again. The streetlights come back on in the development below them.

"So, uh," Flyboy says. "I guess you need a ride?"

~

Her name is Megan. She is seventeen years old — she looks about twelve — and she first woke up in midnight three and a half weeks ago.

That's nice, Melissa guesses, but she has no idea what this girl wants with them. She tries to reach out, find the girl's thoughts — there's hardly any mind noise on this highway, but maybe this girl is just good at hiding herself —

And encounters nothing.

There isn't a single flavor or sound coming from Megan's mind. It's like dead air. She frowns, concentrates harder — nothing. Not a single thought reaches her, not one emotion. A fuzziness coats Melissa's tongue as she pushes harder — the strange feeling of earlier, a funny sensation on her tongue that itches a bit but doesn't _taste_ like _anything_. They might as well be in the car with a robot.

"What?" Megan asks, and Melissa realizes that she must be staring.

"Nothing," Melissa says defensively. This girl is weird. More than weird. Weirder than Jessica when she first arrived in town. Who doesn't have _thoughts?_

"You have this look on your face."

"This _look_ is how I always look. Like you know anything about us," Melissa mutters.

Megan crosses her arms. "I've seen you before."

"Yeah? Where?" Melissa suddenly remembers, with startling clarity, the odd incident in the diner — thinking she saw someone who wasn't there. "You were at that diner with us in town earlier, weren't you?"

"Yeah. There, and before. I saw you in Edmond."

"You saw us in _Edmond?_ " Jonathan asks. His shock hits Melissa like a wave, overcoming her for a moment. She's thankful he doesn't veer into another lane.

Megan's gaze slides towards the window — shiftily, Melissa thinks, but she can't _tell_ , can't know for sure what this girl is thinking. She doesn't know if she likes this silence or not. She never realized it before, but not knowing what someone is thinking is a little unnerving.

"Yeah," she says finally.

Jonathan inhales a deep breath. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, his bouncy Flyboy thoughts ping-ponging from one scenario to another, all the possible roads that might have led them here. Finally he says, "We should talk about this."

Melissa rolls her eyes, seeing the secondary thought in his head, buried under it all. "We'll find someplace to eat, too."

~

They find a rest stop with a McDonald's off the highway. It's practically dead at this time of night — just some truckers grabbing food, a couple of college-age kids who must be on their way back from Thanksgiving break. The three of them stick out, especially Megan, who is so small and slight that she could be a middle schooler.

They wait for their food in silence, then carry their trays of greasy fries and burgers to a table. Melissa can handle McDonald's burgers. They're barely even meat.

Megan opens and closes her cardboard box of chicken nuggets. Her bravado is gone, fingers shaking in her black cut-off gloves.

Flyboy clears his throat. "So. Edmond."

Megan sucks in a deep breath. "So about a month ago, I was up late doing homework, and the world turned blue and everything just…stopped. It kept happening every night. It started to freak me out, so I would take, like, Benadryl and stuff to sleep through it. And then, you know, I'm applying to college — or I was — and I had a thing scheduled at UO to shadow a student and look at the campus." She looks down. "That's where I met Ashley."

"Time froze while I was visiting, so I just…went out to explore. It's kind of nice, you know? The whole world is empty, and the little creatures never bothered me much." Megan's eyes slide away from them. "I didn't see any big ones until later. And Ashley was there, too, and we ran into each other. We kept in touch, trying to figure out what was happening. She visited me, sometimes. She was visiting me when…when she died."

"Were you with her?" Melissa asks quietly.

Megan shakes her head. "I wanted to show her this book, but I left it in my room, so I ran back to get it. It was stupid." She makes a little high-pitched, strangled noise. "It wasn't even related to anything. Just some dumb book. And when I came back, they were — they were — "

"We know," Jonathan says.

Her hand twists in her napkin, knuckles turning white. "I shouldn't have left her."

They're all quiet for a moment. Megan's grief is heavy over them, and for a moment it feels like Melissa can read her mind anyway — can taste the sour festering guilt, the bitter press of sadness against her tongue.

Finally, Flyboy says, "You must have questions. About all of this."

"I guess." Megan's brows knit together. "Where are you guys even from?"

"Bixby. In Oklahoma. Where are _you_ from?"

"Oregon, originally. My family moved to Edmond when I was little."

 _Because they wanted to or because someone put the idea into their heads?_ Melissa wonders. She thinks of Madeleine luring Jessica and Jonathan's families to Bixby — how many families had she tried to bring here, just like she tried to force women to give birth at midnight? How many people did she _almost_ convince, who settled in Tulsa or Broken Arrow instead of Bixby?

"You're _from_ Edmond?" Jonathan asks.

Megan nods. "Yeah. That's where I first saw you guys."

"Wait," Jonathan says. "You've been following us since Edmond, but we never even saw you. What are you, invisible?"

Megan's eyes slide away from them. "Um, not exactly."

"You're _kind of_ invisible?" Melissa can feel the incredulousness rolling off of him.

"She kind of is," she says quietly. Flyboy turns to stare at her, and Melissa motions across the table. "I can't taste her at all."

"You can't _what?_ " Megan asks.

"We'll explain talents later," Melissa says. " _I_ want to know how exactly you're doing this."

"I'm not _doing_ anything," Megan says. "I just…" She shrugs. "I don't think they can see me. Those creatures. And whenever people are around me, the creatures can't see them either. I think that's why — when I left Ashley — "

"So you can hide from them," Flyboy says. "And maybe from mindcasters, too."

"People don't notice me at all, really," Megan says. "Unless I get really, really close to them. Like one time I tried to — " Her face turns pink. "When I first figured it out, I tried to mess with this guy I go to school with, but I snuck up right behind him and he caught me. That didn't go well."

"Is that how you were following us?" Melissa tastes Jonathan's paranoia that she was in the car with them this whole time.

Megan nods. "After time unfroze, I followed you guys and listened to you talk. I didn't get close enough for you to notice me. One time, you went to the bathroom or something when you were out eating, and I saw that list of cities you carry around. Nobody notices me sneaking on buses or anything like that." She hesitates. "So you guys are going around the country…looking for more people like us?"

"Midnighters," Melissa supplies. This whole training thing is going to be a pain in the ass. She doesn't know how Rex ever had the patience to do it. But then, Rex has always had patience that Melissa can't seem to find in herself. Patience with his parents, with midnight, with her.

She shoves the thought away. "And yeah, that's basically what we're doing."

"But there must be hundreds of us. Or thousands."

"I didn't say it was a good idea," Melissa mutters.

Flyboy snorts. "So Megan, it was just you and Ashley?"

Megan pauses, then nods. "Yeah. I mean, well…" She fiddles with her napkin, tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces, making a little snowfall onto the plastic table. "There was someone else. A guy. But he was only with us for a little while. He thought we were holding him back or whatever."

Something about her tone strikes Melissa as strange, but she can't figure out what it is.

"Do you know where he is now?" Jonathan asks.

"No idea. He's from Tennessee originally, but I don't know if he went back. I kind of got the impression that he doesn't get along with his folks."

"Maybe we should find him," Jonathan says, looking sidelong at Melissa. "I mean, he's alone out there. It's dangerous."

"He's probably fine," Megan says quickly. "He's way smart, he figured out a ton of this midnight stuff before me and Ashley did. Like that the creatures have a thing about the number twelve. All the places where this time-freezing thing happens have a multiple of twelve in their coordinates. That's what he told us. So he's probably just fine."

"Sounds like a polymath," Melissa says with a groan. Just what they need, another smarty-pants know-it-all. Dess will probably be over the moon to find this out. Maybe she'll finally get a boyfriend and stop feeling so left out all the time. Not that Melissa's ever gotten any thoughts about boys from Dess, but whatever. She tries not to listen too closely to that kind of thing.

"A what?"

"Never mind. Look, so what you need to know — those creatures you see in the blue time? The little ones are called slithers, and the big ones are called darklings."

"Oh," Megan says. "And you two can fight them?"

"Yeah," Jonathan says. "So can you, once you know how."

"Oh," she says again. "But some of the stuff we can do only works when time stops, right? Like you can only do that…jumping thing in the frozen time."

Melissa heaves a sigh. "It's called the secret hour. Or the blue time." God, she has to deal with new midnighters, _and_ they don't even know the slang? She doesn't get paid enough to put up with this. She doesn't get paid anything, actually.

"Whatever," Megan says. She pauses, and Melissa doesn't have to read her mind to see the hope on her face. "So…I can come with you, right?"

Even Melissa can't say no to the look on her face. "Yeah, sure," she says. "Why not."


	9. too much pressure to take

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from "crawling" by linkin park.

"You really have to look into getting a car," Dess says, her breathing heavy.

Rex wants to say something biting back, but he can't get his breath under control. It's freezing outside, but they're cycling so hard that sweat is dripping down his back, under his coat and shirt. Finally he manages to puff out, "Do you see me with the money for a car?"

"We could steal one." Dess's eyes go a little starry. "We could find one at the junkyard and fix it up."

"Sure, because people drop working cars off at the junkyard all the time." Actually, the idea's not all bad. A crappy, broken-down car would probably be easier for him to handle than some new contraption, and fixing it up would give Dess something to do.

They don't need any more on their plate, though. Melissa and Jonathan gone, Jessica trapped in the blue time — and now this, what Dess told him. Midnighters dying. What can they even do about it? Rex doesn't know where to begin. Do they find a way to warn every town on Dess's list to—to what? Stay inside at midnight? Impose a curfew like Bixby's? Evacuate? Right, like a whole town would believe two teenagers. Do they take off like Melissa and Jonathan? Do they take Jessica with them, and go slowly enough that she can walk to catch up with them during the secret hour?

But they have to do _something_. This isn't just a random thing — something is happening. Rex can feel it.

He can't say these things to Dess. She won't believe him, won't believe in just a feeling.

They're meeting Beth Day and Cassie Flinders at the main library in Tulsa, a joyous forty-five minute bike ride to the nearest bus stop, and then another twenty minutes on one of the city buses. They make it to the bus station and chain their bikes to bike stands with rusty locks — Rex never actually has to _use_ his bike lock in Bixby.

Rex checks the bus schedule nervously, wanting to be sure they get on the right one. He's never come into Tulsa that often, but it makes him especially edgy now. So many people. So many new, buzzing technologies that haven't quite reached into the suburbs yet. A bus goes by, sparking on an overhead cable.

He's getting better. These things don't make him want to jump out of his skin anymore. But they're still bothersome, like a hundred little mosquito bites all over his body that can't be itched.

"Relax, Rexy," Dess says. She reaches over and pokes him in the ribs. It's not the instant relief of Melissa's touch, but there's something comforting in it. Rex smiles and makes a show of loosening his shoulders.

It's weird to be here with Dess. Not bad, just strange. She has always been apart from him and Melissa, in her way. She has a different schedule at school, she has different interests. He's never really considered her as her own person, he realizes. If Melissa were here, he would've asked her to come with him to the library instead, and not just because she is the one with a car. They might've invited Dess along as the third point of their little midnight triangle — but then, they might not have. Maybe Dess has noticed this all along.

The winter sun is going down by the time they make it to the library, but it's still open for another few hours. Rex and Dess hurry towards the entrance.

There's a girl standing on the library steps, huddled against the chill. She's wrapped in a thick blue sweater, wind whipping strands of red hair around her face.

 _Jess,_ Rex thinks, feeling bad about keeping her waiting. Jessica is never late to anything — except world-ending emergencies, of course. She sets her watch a whole ten minutes early.

Then he remembers, and the shock freezes him for a moment. Something stabs deep in his chest, and the strength of the feeling surprises him.

"I thought it was her, too," Dess says quietly.

"Hey, Beth," Rex calls.

Beth turns towards them, her face drawn and sad. It's too serious an expression for a thirteen-year-old, and that causes a pang, too.

"Hi," she says when they get close enough. "Thanks for meeting us."

"Where's Cassie?" Dess asks.

Beth tilts her head towards the door. "Inside. My dad's coming to get us at eight, so we have until then to look for something." She pauses and adds, "And I mean eight exactly. He's been majorly paranoid since Jess…"

She trails off, the sentence ending there. _Since Jess_ , no verb. Rex gets what she means.

They walk into the library together, Beth tugging the sweater sleeves over her pale hands. Rex's darkling senses catch the scent clinging to the fabric — vanilla and sugar, like cookies. It's familiar, too familiar to belong to Beth. It's a scent that used to hover around him every day, at lunches and passing in the halls.

"That's Jessica's sweater, isn't it?" he asks.

Beth looks a little surprised, then her eyes cloud and she looks away. "Yeah. I just..." She sniffs. "Don't tell her. She hates when I steal her clothes."

Dess cracks a smile, but they don't say anything to that. What is there to say?

"Anyway, Cassie and I were here on a field trip the other day," Beth says, her voice turning brusque.

Rex whistles. "Wow. Field trips all the way to Tulsa? Bixby Middle is really stepping it up."

"We're supposed to be doing papers on local history," Beth says. "Like, Tulsa, the race riots, the founding of Bixby, stuff like that. So we were doing research, and we found this book. It was about one of the first families who left Tulsa to live in Bixby, and they had this daughter who was, like, crazy. Or that's what people thought, anyway. She had this obsession with the number thirteen, and she was always disappearing at night — they thought she was sneaking out to meet boys, which — this was, like, the 1900s, so they were _very_ not into that."

A thrill of excitement chases itself down Rex's spine. "What happened to her?"

"We don't know," Beth admits. "Our teacher caught us reading it — especially the part where they thought she lost her virtue or whatever — and said we couldn't do our report on it because it was inappropriate."

"Sounds like Bixby Middle," Dess says. "And Bixby High too, actually, so get used to it."

Cassie is already at a table, a stack of books next to her. A few more are open in front of her, tiny text printed together in cramped rows. They're definitely not books that most eighth graders would be reading.

"Hey, Cassie," Rex says. "How's it going?"

"I'm good," Cassie says. Her mouth twists a little, like she's not sure what to say. "What's up with you guys?"

"We're okay," Dess says. She nods at the books. "What've you got?"

"Not much," Cassie mutters. She flicks one of the books with a fingernail. "They keep mentioning stuff that might important, but they won't go into any details. See, we found this thing about this family, the Ellises. They keep mentioning them, but we can't find a book specifically _about_ them."

"Let me see," Rex says, spinning the book towards himself in a fluid motion. Cassie and Beth blink, and he lets himself feel a moment of satisfaction. He's still surprised by his own newfound grace sometimes, surprised and pleased to find that his step is lighter, that he doesn't trip when walking up stairs or in the school hallways.

He's even more surprised when Beth puts her head right over his shoulder, looking at the book. "What are you looking for?"

Rex ignores her question for a moment, wondering if Beth's total lack of regard for personal space is a little-sister thing. Is this what it would be like to have a sibling?

"This is what I'm looking for," he says finally, pointing at a small number on the page. "Footnotes."

Beth's brow wrinkles. "Okay?"

"You use footnotes when you want to reference something else in a paper or book or whatever. You have to put the name and author of the book you're referencing in the footnote so other people can find it."

"I know what a footnote _is_ ," Beth says. "I just didn't know how to find them."

Rex flips through the book, looking for a mention of midnight. "What was the girl's name?"

"Elizabeth Ellis. Her parents were like the third or fourth family to move out here."

Rex scans the pages, looking for words that jump out, references that seem to familiar. Mostly, the book goes on about the families who first moved to Bixby from Tulsa, how they planted corn before the discovery of oil, blah blah blah.

There are some stories about Elizabeth Ellis: one time she had accused a man of stealing from the town's money supply. A lockbox of the stolen money was found in his house, but no one knew how she had known it was there. Another time, she had disappeared for four days in the summer of 1912. The whole town was frantic, but they quietly wondered if she had simply gotten herself in trouble for good — she was known for disappearing at night, and she displayed an aptitude for mathematics that was unusual for a woman…

Rex lets out a short laugh and nudges Dess. "Looks like our crazy founder's daughter was a polymath."

Dess looks up from the book she's been reading. "Really?"

She takes the book and flips through a few pages, while Rex wonders. The story sounds vaguely familiar — he's probably read about Elizabeth Ellis in the lore, although the lore doesn't usually use names. He would have to check his notes. But he's never found anything actually written by her, of that he's sure.

Dess eventually passes the book back, and Rex keeps looking. Finally, he finds something: a short line saying that Elizabeth Ellis wanted to move to Texas, that she wrote diary entries expressing her disappointment in Bixby.

A diary. That is a personal thing, it has to be written in her own words. Rex flips to the back, looking for the references for that paragraph. There are hundreds of them. Rex sighs. "What's the point of of having footnotes if you don't put them at the _foot_ of the page?" he mutters.

"Rex has opinions about this kind of thing," Dess stage-whispers to Beth and Cassie.

"Here," he says, pointing at a tiny printed reference line next to the number 168. (A multiple of twelve; the number soothes his brain.) _Elizabeth Ellis. Personal diary entry, January 15, 1918. Tulsa & Osage County Preservation Society._

"What the hell does that mean?" Dess asks.

"It means it's owned by a museum or another library or something," Rex says. "We'd have to go to them to read it."

Dess blows a breath out in frustration. "We need to know _exactly_ what was in that diary, and none of these books are saying."

"I'm sure they loan this stuff out for projects," Rex says. "It's a piece of Bixby history. The Ellises were one of the first families to settle here, and they're rich as hell, even today."

Dess frowns. "We don't go to school with any of them, do we?"

"Nah, they go to private school in Tulsa. But they live out by where Constanza used to live."

Beth looks at her watch. "I have to go soon. Let me just ask if the librarian knows where that stupid preservation society is."

She runs off, the too-large sweater flapping behind her like a sail. When she comes back, she's frowning.

"The librarian said the Tulsa & Osage County Preservation Society is a private organization," Beth says. "It's run by the Grayfoot family."


End file.
